by Neely Tucker
“You—you presume to know things,” Stevens said, “that you couldn’t possibly—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Sully said. “MPD found Lambert Ellison III’s gun down at the Bend the other night, where it was used to kill two major-league drug dealers.”
Stevens’s face, the eyebrows starting up, the mouth moving.
“Billy also wrote at least a partial draft of the note he left you and Delores,” he said. “Which I happen to have with me.”
He pulled a single sheet of paper from his backpack and slid it across the coffee table.
Stevens’s face became very still, the tension in his forehead absolute and frozen, his lips paper-thin slits, his fingers reaching out to pick up the slip of paper. He brought it to his face and said, briefly, “This is just a copy of something. It’s not even—”
“I have the original,” Sully said, softly. “We’re using it for layout in the story.”
Stevens looked at him across the sheet of paper, which was quivering ever so slightly in his hand, but his face was still holding, Sully saw, for the last time in his career, keeping it together, not yet aware of how completely all of this—the power office, the lunches, the deference he was accustomed to and thrived upon—was about to end.
“The thing that was always bothering me,” Sully said, “was these investigators you hired. You told me they were to help out with the homicide investigation. ‘To make sure justice is done,’ that’s what you said in your statement, how they were going to help track down the killers.
“But look at me. I been down there in the Bend, the gay clubs on O Street, talked to the cops? Nobody saw these guys investigating anything. Nobody. I thought that was pretty strange, but I was thinking you guys had the drop. I figured that maybe we were in the wrong place—maybe Billy had been shot somewhere else and brought to the Bend to make it look like a drug deal, right, and your investigators had tracked down the real place of the killing? And that the police and I were just that dumb and that you guys were just that smart?
“Well. I was dumb, but not in the way I thought. You hired investigators to track down Billy’s research, not his killer. You know the only people to see your investigators? Elliot. And his new partner. Who don’t—and couldn’t possibly—know sweet fuckall about the Bend. You couldn’t possibly have been trying to find out who killed him because you already knew. You already knew he killed himself, and why, because he told you all of that in a note just like that one you’re holding. You ran upstairs, looked in that velvet box, the gun was gone, and you knew.
“And yet you and Delores blew right past that, past your grief or what have you, and you hired those goons to find Billy’s research, his thesis, and get rid of it. You and Delores—and really, just you—created this story about Billy being some sort of drug dealer, like that was the dark family secret. A wannabe rap star, right? Wasn’t that it? So that everybody would think he was shot by another dealer. Then my story about the Bend ran. Delores panicked and thought I was onto the whole thing—selling her son out like that, the family reputation gone to hell—and it ate her alive. So she called me up and said, ‘I got to show you something.’ She was eaten up with guilt. She wanted me to know that she went along with it, but that it was your idea. You told her that it would fix everything. But it didn’t.”
“What—what is it, Mr. Carter, that you think you know,” Stevens said, sitting now, taking a wing chair across the room, “that would prompt such actions on our part?”
Playing it to the end. Sully admired that. It was fucked up, but he admired it, in the way he admired how a snake’s head would bite you even after it had been severed.
“What I know,” Sully said, “is that the foundation of the family fortune, the basis of the empire, was not dear old Nathaniel Ellison and his bank. It was his mother, Jeanne-Marie.”
Stevens looked at him, and Sully could see everything inside the man melt and slide away from its moorings, like a wax figure melting from inside.
“Jeanne-Marie,” Sully said, “co-owner of Frenchman’s Bend, one of the largest slave-selling markets in the United States. She was at first the mistress, then business partner, of Didier Delacroix, the Frenchman himself. Delacroix’s wife, that was Lisette; she died in the 1840s, the consumption, which is what they used to call tuberculosis. They had one child, Joshua Steven, but he was just a tot. So, to help run the empire, who did Didier turn to? Who else? Jeanne-Marie, his black mistress. Who was French. She was the overseer, the one who split families apart and sold off black children like livestock. They were almost all teenagers, the stock at the Bend, did you know that? And she sold them all.
“It was good business, if you had the stomach for it, but then there was the war and all that unpleasantness. Two years after it ended—this is 1867—Didier up and died. A widower, he left half of everything to Joshua and half to Jeanne-Marie. Overnight, she became, very likely, the richest black woman in America. Whatever her last name had been, she changed it to Ellison, stayed in the shadows, and gave their child, Nathaniel, the inheritance. Which he had the good sense to launder and start a bank. And so the Ellison myth of American ingenuity began. But the real source of their wealth, like so many others of the era, was slaves. They kept it hidden for nearly a century and a half. Till Billy dug it up. Imagine what it did to him, a kid already beset by depression, mania—”
“This—this—”
“The Ellisons were never slaves, not a day in their lives, you knew that, right? Jeane-Marie came across on the boat with Didier from the old country, gay old Paris. She’d been his mistress for years, under the family-servant guise or nanny or whatever. When he went into the slave business, she was the one who dealt with the slaves, decided who to buy and sell, as she had the more native eye for it.”
Silence, the mouth coming open, a small and tiny O.
“You know all this, Shellie. You’ve known it all your life. Didier Delacroix is your great-whatever grandfather.”
“I—”
“Didier fathered Nathaniel by Jeanne-Marie, yeah, but don’t forget his, what should we call him—legitimate son?—dear old Joshua Steven Delacroix. By the time Josh was in his late twenties—after the war ended—the Delacroix name became inconvenient to have around here. Lincoln assassinated, vigilante groups, freed slaves—it was a nightmare. Both his parents were dead. So he dropped the surname and added an S to the middle. And appeared to vanish.
“But Billy found him, in that deep hell of research he was into. Joshua moved to New York. Invested in mines and railroads. And when his son moved back to D.C. during World War One, he was just another rich New York lawyer.
“Three generations later”—Sully spread his hands, encompassing the house, the grounds—“here you sit, counselor. The progeny of the Frenchman himself.”
FORTY
IT TOOK STEVENS a moment to gather himself—like Lee at Gettysburg, Sully thought, doomed but taking the offensive to the end—and he rallied.
“Many people owned slaves, Carter,” he said. “My ancestors, Delores’s. It’s nothing to be proud of but in the context of the day it was not shocking. People, all over the South, descendants carry on without shame. Her family and mine shared a common bond, known to each generation but never aired in public.”
“You don’t say.”
“It was a sort of cultural affiliation, the sort of which I would not expect someone like you to understand, with your inherent loathing of the wealthy. You wear your white-trash roots on your sleeve, like it’s some sort of badge of honor instead of being the disgrace that it is. When my legal firm—which I took over from my father—hired William, everyone thought we took him as the star and that we brought Delores, his wife, on board as extra compensation. In fact, William was the token. Delores was the hire, keeping the bond between the families.”
“I couldn’t give a fuck about that, counselor, and neither could you,” S
ully said. “That your family and Delores’s traded in slaves is one thing. But you lied about it. Hid it. And that gave the past a power it never would have had otherwise. You two could deal with it, keep your self-superior faces on, but it destroyed Billy.
“Imagine it. Nice kid, a little fragile, starts doing a thesis about his wonderful family, the thing in life of which he was most proud. A paper that would further burnish the Ellison name. Instead, he finds slavery and a century of mendacity, including his own mother and godfather. He comes to you two, upset and shouting, and you both tell him to shut up and sit down. So what, in his mental illness, can he do about it? Why, he can end it. He can end the whole thing. He gets the family gun and goes to the Bend, the source of the family wealth, and kills himself. How very symbolic. How very obvious. No wonder Delores panicked, thinking I would discover it. You know the last thing she said, counselor? ‘You were going to find out.’”
Shellie looked up at him now, his face crumpling into the ruination that Sully, in a flash of insight, realized would define his features for the rest of his life, that would carry him to the grave. He did not speak, just sat there with a hollow-eyed stare, a vacant expression that was perhaps not too far removed from the one Billy Ellison had that day on the ice.
“Delores didn’t kill herself because her ancestors, and yours, dealt in slaves,” Sully said. “She killed herself because the two of you cooked up a false story about Billy. You two came up with this slander about him being a drug user and dealer, portraying him as the racist stereotype of his generation, in order to keep your secret. Delores killed herself because of what she’d done to her son after he was dead. You knew it. That’s why you were almost sick outside her funeral. You knew what you’d done to her.”
Stevens looked at him.
“You’re going to—to publish this?” It was a whisper.
“On the front fucking page.”
“But to—to what end?” Stevens said, the air hissing out of him. “Delores is dead. Billy is dead. You’d destroy her name just to expose me? My family?”
Sully hit his pager to summon Sly and Lionel.
He put Billy’s papers and the pistol box back in his briefcase. He snapped it shut. The bourbon wasn’t finished, so he took care of that, then threw the glass on a long arc into the dining room, where it shattered. Using his good leg first, he stood up and came across the room and leaned over Stevens sitting in his wing chair, still wearing the ridiculous visor and golf slacks. His tone, it was almost a whisper, like a priest intoning a benediction.
“You’n ask your God for mercy, absolution, forgiveness, all you want,” he said. “I’m not in that line of work. I will bury you, counselor, without mercy and without a second thought. You fucked over Billy Ellison, your godson, your emotionally damaged, frail, and vulnerable godson. And you, so help me Christ, will answer for it.”
FORTY-ONE
Billy Ellison was not a homicide victim. He neither dealt in nor used narcotics. He was not in Frenchman’s Bend, the city’s most notorious open-air drug market, on the night of his death to settle business in that trade.
Instead, an investigation by this newspaper has found that Ellison, 21, committed suicide—with his grandfather’s handgun—as a desperate last measure to call attention to his family’s long-concealed ties to the former slave-trading post on the District’s leeward shore.
The story took shape on the screen, line by line, steady and assured. It laid out everything. It attributed the groundbreaking research on the Bend to Billy’s thesis. It came with speed and confidence. There was no bourbon involved, which, Sully thought, would make Alexis proud.
He wrote in a public file so that Eddie and the rest of management could read it as it took shape, but there were few interruptions. R.J. came by midafternoon and rapped on the top edge of the cubicle.
“The firm, it’s officially the Stevens Group, not the Stevens Firm,” he said. “And let’s make it Sheldon Stevens on first reference, instead of Shellie.”
Sully nodded.
“Also, after you file? Eddie wants you to stop in his office. I think he’s going to ask you to go to lunch. There’s going to be, I wouldn’t call it an apology, but there’s going to be something like it. A note in the personnel folder, retracting the suspension, reinstatement of lost pay, like that.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t be a prick about it.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t say, ‘I told you so.’”
“All right already.”
R.J. left and he went back to work.
After a while, Sully called John Parker. John listened to what he’d found out, cursing twice, and then Sully asked him for comment.
There was a pause, and then John said, “Okay, let’s go with this. ‘One of our first lines of inquiry was suicide, and the Ellison family and their attorney, Mr. Stevens, repeatedly assured us there was no such possibility. There was no mention of Billy Ellison’s mental instability or of a suicide note or of a pistol taken from the family home. Mrs. Ellison and Mr. Stevens informed us they were hiring private investigators to assist us, in whatever fashion possible, with solving Billy’s murder. That was the term they used repeatedly. ‘Murder.’ We will take these reports into account and revisit our investigation.’”
When he finished, he told Sully he was going to talk off the record and Sully said sure.
“I’ll get that prick’s law license for this,” he said. “He’s an officer of the court. I could go for obstruction of justice, but that would go to trial and take forever and he’d probably beat it. But the law license, that’s a matter before the bar. That’s going down.”
“What about the other thing?”
“Which other thing?”
“The gun. Billy’s gun. It was used to kill the Hall brothers.”
John jumped on that.
“Yeah, no shit. Somebody had to pick it up after Billy used it. That means, it happening in the Bend, that it couldn’t have been the South Caps. It means somebody already in the Bend, in the M Street Crew, picked it up, threw Billy’s body in the water. That same person then used it to kill the Hall brothers. Which means it was an inside job.”
“That give you a suspect?”
Another pause.
“By name, for me to tell you, right now, even off the record? No. But whoever turns up running the Bend in a couple of weeks, it’s going to be him. That’s not a long list of people. Didn’t I tell you all this was going to tie into this new stuff getting piped in down there? Well. There you go.”
“The way all that worked out,” Sully said, “it’s curious, isn’t it?”
There was a long pause.
“Yeah,” John said. “Curious, brother. It is. That’s just what I was thinking.”
• • •
By late afternoon, with deadline looming, he was down to the kicker of the story. It wasn’t difficult. Sorting through the papers scattered across his desk, he retrieved the partial note the late Billy Ellison had left behind. It wasn’t the final note, no, but it was a rough draft, and that was good enough. Elliot had come down to the paper and verified it as Billy’s handwriting.
Sully just quoted it.
So, Mom, I don’t know why you’ve been lying about this all this time. I don’t know why you hate who I’ve become. I can’t do anything about that. But I can do something. I can end it all. I am the last of the Ellisons, and that is one thing that—
The page was torn at that point, leaving the rest of his thoughts to himself.
He was only wrong about one thing, Sully thought. His mother had been the last of the Ellisons.
Had Sully been the type to weep, he might have. He thought Billy Ellison a good man. A young one, but a good man. They died all the time. They always had.
AFTERWORD & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE PRECEDING IS a work of
fiction.
Washington, D.C., did indeed have a series of slave pens in the antebellum era and some of those factual accounts are included herein. The epigraph and the horrific accounts of the Williams and Robey slave pens in the city, and the Franklin and Armfield place just across the river in Alexandria, Virginia, are taken from historical accounts, as is the journey of the Pearl. The Red Summer of 1919 took place largely as presented.
Frenchman’s Bend, however, is cut entirely of fictional cloth. Neither it nor its proprietors and descendants ever existed.
The careful reader will notice that, as in The Ways of the Dead, I have taken small liberties with other D.C. timelines and geography.
This book is affectionately dedicated to the late Tommy Miller, my old professor, mentor, friend, and one of the western world’s most underappreciated newspaper editors. He taught me how to think and write and how to make a living with a pen and a notebook. I miss him, as do so many others.
Many, many thanks are extended to the people who supported the writing of this book and who read, edited, and thought aloud about how it could be better. Most of the mostest is my adorable spouse, the belle of Jamaica, Carol Smith Tucker, my first reader, critic, and watcher of the kids when I am locked in a small room with the keyboard. Also, lookin’ at you, Lynn Medford, my most boss at The Washington Post; Elyse Cheney, agent extraordinaire; and Allison Lorentzen, my very most wonderful editor at Viking. Thank you, ladies. Take the rest of the day off.
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